Constructing conscience: freedom and self-governance in colonial New England

American politics and law, like other liberal democracies, couches itself in the protection of the free individual, one who possesses both “beliefs” and the unalienable right to those “beliefs.” The “freedom of religion” guaranteed to U.S. citizens in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment prioritizes this supposedly private and transcendent realm of “sincerity,” “faith,” and “experience,” kept separate from the contextual and temporal world of society and politics. Historians of American religion, and scholars of religion more broadly, have long taken this “interiority” rhetoric to be self-evident, ignoring the prescriptive implications of positing such an interiority at all. Rather than understanding these rhetorics of “interiority” as referencing a non-empirical and apolitical reality of autonomous “selfhood,” this paper will argue that the constitutional protection of the autonomous individual is constitutive of a particular type of political subjectivity, one that allows for those in power to manage dissent by authorizing some differences and marginalizing others. I will therefore interrogate the function of institutionalizing such an “interiority” in the first place, in order to understand how and why American society works the way that it does. Using three cases from seventeenth-century New England to better inform contemporary cases involving “conscientious objection,” I will argue that the privatized discourse of “religion,” and thus a discourse of the “self-governing individual,” functions as a tool of governance through the authorization, exclusion, and negotiation of unfalsifiable claims.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Alabama Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• McMurray, Keeley Malone

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Altman, Michael J.

Contributors dc:contributor

• McCutcheon, Russell T.
• Kopelson, Heather M.
• Simmons, K. Merinda

• Religious history
• American history
• Rhetoric

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Dc Identifier Other

u0015_0000001_0003636
McMurray_alatus_0004M_14143

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ir.ua.edu:123456789/7035